2009-06-01

On time zones and smart design

When exporting the photos of the hotel atrium for the blog entry of last night, they were in "tomorrow's" date folder on the computer. I had forgotten to change the time in the camera. Now I brought just the simple compact camera, not the DSLR, and I don't know its menus that well. But it was easy to find time settings and I was completely surprised to see that it had the option of setting two time zones: "home" and "destination". Destination is sought by scrolling across a world map; no need to fiddle with hour settings at all. It's a breeze! In the DSLR I'd have to search through more menu pages and then would have to adjust hour settings manually.

But even in the DSLR I still could DO it. In my so-called smartphone, I quickly returned to the European time settings, because when I changed the time zone, the MS-Outlook app decided that all appointments would have to be adjusted as well, completely spoiling the carefully-planned dinner meeting to midday, interviews to the middle of the night... Why would it assume that I made appointments in my home time zone if they were for an intercontinental trip?

Well, to compensate for that bit of frustration about not so smart design, I'll add another picture of the hotel atrium--still with the wrong time zone in its data, if you care to look them up :-)